Handmade Is Better

There's a common adage that says, "Handmade is better." Whether it's food, handicrafts, or other trinkets, products made by human hands are treated better than factory-produced ones.

The logic behind this idea is that profit-oriented retail/store items are designed to be mass-produced as quickly and cheaply as possible, and are therefore low quality. Conversely, handmade items are much more personable and can be customized to fit the individual client/recipient's specific wants or needs, making them unique and one-of-a-kind.

Furthermore, it takes skill to create great artwork, or food, or anything else. Therefore, the fact that something so well-made is crafted by hand instead of assembled by specialized machines is seen as more impressive and, therefore, better.

In romance stories, The Power of Love may be at play, as the gift receiver appreciates the thought, time, and effort their loved one pours into making the goods (even if it turns out badly) more than expensive stuff bought from the store, or even ones commissioned from professionals. Sentimental Homemade Toy is a subtrope.

Might overlap with New Technology Is Evil and Appeal to Nature, since this often comes with the mindset that things made "naturally" by human hands are better than those made by unreliable machines.

Compare Technician Versus Performer, which pits a work/performance carried out with technical perfection and polish against one presented with a more creative and outside-the-box flourish. See also A Master Makes Their Own Tools.

Contrast Crappy Homemade Gift and Homemade Sweater from Hell, where the homemade stuff is seen as low-quality crap precisely because it's not professionally made.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Inverted in one 2015 Australian instant pizza ad, whose tagline is "no celebrity chef required". It features a woman baking the pizza while Gordon Ramsay is sent to wash dishes and otherwise do manual chores every time he tries to help with the pizza preparation. The implication being that the ready-to-bake premade pizza is just as good as one made by Gordon himself.
• In "Mind Reader", a 2022 advertisement for Amazon Alexa, Scarlett Johansson claims at a dinner party that the bread is homemade using her Grandma's Recipe. Her mind-reading Alexa tells everyone it was store-bought, implying that she lied about making it as doing so would have been more impressive.

Anime & Manga

• Ah! My Goddess: In the anime series, Belldandy hand-knits Keiichi a sweater for Christmas. Meanwhile, Urd uses magic to accomplish the same task, while Skuld uses a machine to do so. Sayoko gets a high-end sweater crafted by a skilled artisan. In the end, it is Belldandy's carefully hand-knitted sweater that Keiichi ends up appreciating.
• Doraemon: The Doraemons Special has a chapter opening with Nobita whining about not having enough money to buy expensive gifts for Shizuka's birthday. With Doramed's help, he time travels to the past to retrieve his grandmother's treasure box, which he lost when he was younger. He manages to find it but is surprised/disappointed when he finds nothing but worn-out pieces of paper inside them. His grandmother then reminds him that they are the paper cranes that Nobita worked hard to make for her when she was sick, and she sagely asserts that she'll have to leave behind any riches she has when she's gone, but she can take Nobita's love and kindness with her to the next life. Inspired, Nobita decides to reproduce the same paper cranes his now-deceased grandmother had treasured so much to give to Shizuka. In a hilarious subversion, however, when Nobita tries to hand over the cranes to her during the party, Shizuka mistook them for some trash and points him to the trash can.
• Hoppe ni Chuuboo!: In one Valentine's chapter, Yummy wants to make chocolates for her crush Tsuyoshi but loses confidence when her rival Cecil flaunts the high-quality chocolates she bought from an expensive store. In the end, though, Tsuyoshi rejects Cecil's store-bought chocolates in favour of Yummy's handmade ones.
• Ranma ½: Zigzagged. Akane believes that handmade stuffs are better, and with a sister like Kasumi it's easy to see why. But Akane herself lacks both the know-how and patience to make a decent homemade gift, be it food or sewing a scarf for Christmas, and more often than not her handiworks end up as Crappy Homemade Gift.
• The Way of the Househusband: In her introductory chapter, Torajiro's sister Koharu arrives in town selling premade donuts from a well-known franchise in a deliberate attempt to hurt her brother's food-truck business. Tatsu helps Tora win against his sister by making his own donut, which tastes much better than Koharu's donuts.
  Tatsu: It's about engaging all five of your customer's senses. You might be able to keep your costs low, but factories that focus on quantity over quality aren't going to be able to do that well.
• Yakitate!! Japan:
  • Alluded in the second volume where Manager Ken Matsushiro mocks inferior bakers as "bread-making machines". Kawachi takes offense at this, and Ken challenges him and Azuma to put their heart and soul into their craft to make better bread.
  • At the end of the Monaco Cup, Azuma manages to best Shadow in the Grand Finals to achieve victory for Team Japan, even though Shadow had used his Power Copying abilities to be able to bake as well as Yuichi Kirisaki. When Shadow complains to Kirisaki about this loss, Kirisaki admits that Azuma has now surpassed his skill. He also mentions Azuma had made a lot of his own ingredients (including sugar) while Shadow uses store-bought ones, citing the "Handmade is better" adage as part of his explanation.

Film - Live Action

• In Santa Claus: The Movie two elves are in the running for Santa's chief assistant, Patch who favours a production line method of creating toys with machines, and Puffy a traditionalist who prefers each toy to be handmade. Patch wins the position but despite his well meaning enthusiasm the toys he makes fall apart and break easy causing a backlash against Santa. The position is handed to Puffy instead but the film's novelisation does explain this is intended as a bit more of nuanced take as Patch's mistake was not modernising but modernising so fast and without developing the know how to maintain his machines as well as ramping up the production too much rather than strictly due to old vs. new methods.

Literature

• Adrian Mole: Adrian's friend Nigel says that Adrian's racing bike is mass-produced, unlike his own which was handmade by a craftsman in Nottingham. Adrian writes that he has gone off Nigel, and also gone off his bike a bit.
• His Dark Materials: In Northern Lights, Lyra's polar clothes are held to be superior to whatever was given to Bolvangar's inmates because hers were handmade from local materials while theirs were made in factories far from the Polar area.
• Justified in Into the Hinterlands. Handmade goods are valuable trade goods not because they're necessarily better than something stamped out in a robotic factory, but because each item is unique. This allows traders to make a good living bartering for handicrafts from the Riders (the setting's equivalent to Native Americans) and then selling them to settlers or cross-Bight trade ships.

Live-Action TV

• Parks and Recreation: Ron firmly believes in self-reliance to the point that he crafts all of his own furniture instead of buying mass-produced. Rather than letting Ben and Leslie buy wedding rings, he forges them a pair out of a lighting sconce.
  Ron Swanson: People who buy things are suckers.
• Star Trek: It's something of a Running Gag across the various series that "real" food (i.e. food that was grown rather than replicated) somehow tastes better, at least to those who aren't used to eating the replicated stuff.
• In an episode of To the Manor Born, Audrey starts selling honey straight from her own hive. Eventually, she gets so successful that she runs out of honey, so she buys commercial stuff from Richard's grocery store and transfers it to her own jars to sell as authentic local honey. Of course she charges many times what the store does.

Theatre

• Fiddler on the Roof: In a humorous inversion, Motel the tailor is overjoyed when he acquires his first sewing machine, as it means his clothes can be produced more accurately and efficiently than when he had to hand-sew every stitch himself.
  Motel: From now on, my clothes will be perfect. Made by machine! No more handmade clothes!

Tabletop Games

• Starfinder: Handmade items have better durability than mass-produced, and you can repair an item that you yourself have crafted in half the usual time.

Video Games

• Dragalia Lost has Sharpshooter Sarisse's adventurer story, where she comes across a craftsman who's closing up shop to work in a factory. When she asks if he still values his work, the craftsman agrees, but making ends meet is more important to him than Doing It for the Art. Sarisse counters by saying handcrafted accessories have a charm to them that mass production lacks, which would bring about an eventual shift in public opinion. This causes the craftsman to reconsider his choices.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, NPC store-bought equipment will always have stats below the listed item level, meaning that it will be significantly weaker than it should be. By contrast, player-made items can be made "high quality", giving it stats appropriate for its level.
• In Quilts & Cats of Calico, Aunt Agatha doesn't trust the Iron Loom, which mass-produces quilts, because its operators don't care about the quality of its output, which is why the cats aren't attracted to it. When Mona challenges the Quilter to a duel with the Iron Loom, they manage to beat it with their handmade quilt, and while Mona is impressed by their skills, she uses that to "improve" the Iron Loom so it'll perform better than humans. It's later revealed that the Quilter's father invented the Iron Loom out of desperation to win the war, and he regrets giving up hand-making quilts for it. However, he's proud of his child continuing his legacy, so he asks them to sew a quilt for him to show how far they've come.

Web Animation

• The Strong Bad Email "what i want" briefly makes fun of this perception, giving an example of a homemade "gift" that was made because it would supposedly be seen as better: a seashell with office supplies haphazardly hot-glued to it.

Western Animation

• Craig of the Creek: King Xavier reveals in "The Other Side: The Tournament" that he prefers handmade gifts over store-bought ones. The reason being that while he can buy almost anything he wants, it is the fact that someone devoted their time to making him something that makes him show genuine appreciation towards them.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Zigzagged in "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000". The central conflict of the episode is a contest between the Apple family, who hand-make (or, well, hoof-make) their apple cider by a careful and laborious artisanal process, and the Flim-Flam brothers, who mass-produce large quantities of it using a complex machine. The twist is that the brothers' product is in fact really good — it only turns into an undrinkable mess once they turn off the quality control in order to ramp up production.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode "Neptune's Spatula", King Neptune challenges SpongeBob to a cook-off after he pulls Neptune's legendary spatula from the grease bucket. SpongeBob spends all the allotted time making a single Krabby Patty by hand and with love, while Neptune uses his magic to mass produce enough burgers to feed the entire stadium. King Neptune is declared the obvious winner... until he and the audience eat his Krabby Patties and find they taste terrible. Neptune then eats SpongeBob's burger and finds it so delicious he immediately hires him as his personal fry cook.

Real Life

• True to some extent when it comes to real-life mass-produced foods. To extend shelf life, most processed foods have preservatives that can end up impacting the flavor compared to homecooked ones that lack these preservatives. To also cut down on cost, they may often use inferior ingredients as well. Joshua Weissman's "But Better" series shows the difference between homemade versions of mass-produced foods with quality ingredients can be night and day.
• Guitar players and the Rock Star place a high value on hand-crafted guitars, tube amplifiers, speaker cabinets and effects. They are willing to pay several times the price of mass-produced gear to buy handmade items. They believe that handmade gear has better tone quality.
• Subverted with WWII La Résistance fighters, who couldn't wait to get rid of the sketchy homemade weapons they used and replace them with a high-quality, precision engineered military-grade gear. Partisans and guerrillas often start their battle against the totalitarian government's army with Molotov cocktails, obsolete museum piece rifles from WWI, hunting rifles, and homemade guns produced in underground workshops (made from pipes), some of which were not that effective.

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